We developed a networked virtual reality system on which one could have live videos with high interactive usage. However, since a client in our system requires both live videos and computer graphics objects continuously from a server while it is rendering the current frame of the virtual world, a quality of the presentation of the virtual space depends on the current available system resources on the client as well as network resources. In this paper, we discuss the notion of QoS for a networked VR system as an application level QoS which is based on the notion of an importance of presence of objects in a virtual space calculated by a distance from a current user's position to the object and an angle from the user's perspective to the object. Then, we show a heuristic mapping mechanism of the application level QoS to a network level QoS which determines the allocation of bandwidth of videos and CG objects to maximize the presentation quality. We adopt bandwidth as an example of network level QoS. We are developing our prototype system on the SGI Indigo utilizing the IRIS Performer with the Virtual Reality Modeling Language 2.0.

Date Published: 10 October 1997
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 3231, Performance and Control of Network Systems, (10 October 1997); doi: 10.1117/12.290421

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 3231:
Performance and Control of Network Systems
Wai Sum Lai; Hisashi Kobayashi, Editor(s)